6 Ways to Force Quit Mac Applications

Do you need to force quit an unresponsive Mac OS X app? Is your Mac seeing the infamously dreaded spinning beachball of death? Is an app failing to respond to any input? Maybe you have an errant process or two? When any of the above happens, you’ll probably want to forcibly quit the application in question, and that’s what we’ll cover with this walkthrough, showing you how to force quit apps on a Mac with six different methods.

Whatever your skill level with Mac OS X, you’ll find a way to forcibly exit out of an app. Take a moment to remember a few keyboard shortcuts or sequences now ,and save yourself a hassle later when Mac apps start acting up. And yes, these tricks work in all versions of OS X.

Starting with one of the best and easiest is the system wide Force Quit function: Hit Command+Option+Escape from anywhere to bring up the simple “Force Quit Applications” window, then click on the app name to select, followed by clicking the “Force Quit” button, this will end the app immediately.

Think of this as a simplified version of Activity Monitor, and it’s also a great keystroke to remember to use since it allows for quickly ceasing multiple apps. If you’re going to remember nothing else for force quitting apps in OS X, remember this keystroke: Command + Option + Escape

That Force Quit keyboard shortcut is probably the best combination of easy and power when force quitting apps in Mac OS X, since you can access it with a keystroke, select and force quit multiple apps if necessary, and summon it from anywhere.

2) Force Quit Currently Active Mac App with the Keyboard

Hold down Command+Option+Shift+Escape for a second or two until the app forcibly closes. Be sure to do this while the app you want to force quit is the foremost application on the Mac, as it will force quit whatever is active when held down.

This is not well known, but offers perhaps the quickest way to force quit the foreground application in Mac OS X and a very good keyboard shortcut to remember.

3) Force Quitting Apps from the Dock

Option + Right Click on an apps icon in the Dock to bring up the “Force Quit” option, selecting this will kill the app without any confirmation.

4) Force Quit an App from the Apple Menu

This is easy to remember but not necessarily the most powerful method, since sometimes an application is completely unresponsive and the menus are inaccessible.

5) Use Activity Monitor to Force Quit Apps

Activity Monitor is a powerful way to forcibly quit any app, task, daemon, or process running on Mac OS X. You can find it in /Applications/Utilities/ or open it from Spotlight with Command+Space and then type ‘Activity Monitor’ and the return key. Using Activity Monitor is very easy: Select the process name or ID you wish to kill (unresponsive apps will usually appear as red), and hit the red “Quit Process” button.

You can think of this as the Mac equivalent to a task manager from the Windows world and a more complex version of the second tips Force Quit window. If one of the previous methods fails, this will almost certainly work.

6) Using the Terminal & kill Command

If all else fails, using the command line is a surefire way to force an app or process to quit by issuing the low-level kill command. Launch the Terminal and type one of the following commands:

killall [processname]

For example, “killall Safari” would kill all instances of the Safari process. If you know the process id, which you can find with the ps or ‘ps aux’ command. Aim kill at that process specifically:

kill -9 [pid]

The kill commands will take out just about anything, and sometimes have the side effect of not honoring Versions, Window Restore, and Auto-Save, so be cautious of potential data loss.

What’s your preferred method of forcibly quitting an app? Mine is the Command+Option+Escape trick, or by using Activity Monitor, but I often turn to the command line for more complex situations.

Remember, when you force quit an app, you will lose any unsaved data in that application. Don’t forget that.

Bonus: Force Quit on iOS

OK it’s not quite the Mac, but it’s useful to know for mobile users: from the iOS side of things, you can force quit apps on iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, by holding down the Power button until the slide to power option appears, and then hold the Home button until the app closes.

Finally! I finally got rid of it thanks to you and Activity Monitor. I just wonder why none of the other sites I searched suggested Activity Monitor as a way of disposing of files that you couldn’t get to go away any other way. Thanks again.

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My Macbook which I got I think in 2009 has started crashing. I did force quit last night when it crashed then froze, and on trying to restart I entered my password and the little progress line got about a third of the way across and won’t budge from there. I have force quit a couple of times after letting it rest an hour or so, but no change. Is there anything I can do or is it time to take it to a Mac repair?

When an OS X machine freezes during reboot, you can find online a list of options, including resetting the P ROM, booting to safe mode, booting from your recovery partition, and booting from a CD/DVD, a USB ROM or drive. If you have two Macs with FireWire ports you can try booting the freezing Mac into Target Drive mode to access any critical files.
Your worst case situation will come if you have encrypted your entire hard drive.

You can’t force quit system tasks without root/admin access and trying to force quit those processes will likely cause unexpected behavior like a log out or system crash, so if you can’t force quit the system process you probably should not anyway. This is really for apps and processes running above the system level, not low level kernel resources or system tasks.

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